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Police release portraits of suspected hotel bombers

Indonesia police have released sketches of the two Indonesian men they suspect were the suicide bombers in the near-simultaneous attacks on two luxury hotels in Jakarta last week.

AFP - Indonesian police released digital images Wednesday of the reconstructed faces of two suspected suicide bombers thought to have attacked luxury hotels in Jakarta last week, killing seven people.

Police said the suspected bomber who killed six people including five foreigners at the JW Marriott was aged only 16 to 17 years old, while the man suspected of carrying out the Ritz-Carlton attack was aged from 20 to 40 years.

The images are being shown to witnesses as part of the investigation into Friday's attacks on the luxury hotels in central Jakarta, the first major terror attack in Indonesia since 2005.

The images were based on two severed heads found at the blast sites which are believed to be those of the bombers, suspected members of the Jemaah Islamiyah regional extremist network or one of its offshoots.

"We found two severed heads on location and we can confirm that they are the suspected suicide bombers," police spokesman Nanan Soekarna told a press conference.

The men had short hair and looked Asian in appearance. The Marriott bomber was described as being 16 to 17 years old, fair-skinned and 180-190 centimetres (5'9"-6'3") tall.

The Ritz-Carlton bomber was decribed as being 20 to 40 years old, with tanned skin and standing 165 centimetres tall.

However as police struggled to identify the bombers, Soekarna said DNA tests on the families of two men suspected of carrying out the attacks, named as Ibrahim and Nur Hasbi, had returned negative results.

"The DNA of the families have not matched the body parts that we have found," Soekarna said.

"Concerning Ibrahim, we've done a DNA test and it's not identical. Also (this is the case) for Nur Hasbi," he said.

He said the sketches also did not match Ibrahim or Nur Hasbi, also known as Nur Said, who is a reported associate of alleged terror mastermind Noordin Mohammed Top.

But police did not explicitly rule out either man as suspects in the wider investigation into the attacks, which have rattled the foreign business and diplomatic community in Indonesia.

"The bodies on the site are not of Nur Hasbi and not of Ibrahim. I'm not saying they're not suspected. Anyone can be investigated," he said.

Senior counter-terrorism officials and police have said the attacks look very much like the work of Noordin, the Malaysian-born leader of a Jemaah Islamiyah splinter group.

Police also confirmed that the Marriott bomber had stayed in room 1,808 of the hotel for two nights before launching his attack, which killed three Australians, an Indonesian and a New Zealander.

The victims at the Marriott were attending a weekly meeting of some of Indonesia's most prominent foreign business executives in a room to the side of the main lobby.

Two people, believed to be a Dutch couple on vacation, were killed in the almost simultaneous attack at the Ritz-Carlton, adjacent to the Marriott.